Teaching telecommunication standards: bridging the gap between theory and practice

©2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Telecommunication standards have become a reliable mechanism to strengthen collaboration between industry and research institutions to accelerate the evolution of communications systems. Standards are needed to enable cooperation while promoting competition. Within the framework of a standard, the companies involved in the standardization process contribute and agree on appropriate technical specifications to ensure diversity and compatibility, and facilitate worldwide commercial deployment and evolution. Those parts of the system that can create competitive advantages are intentionally left open in the specifications. Such specifications are extensive, complex, and minimalistic. This makes telecommunication standards education a difficult endeavor, but it is much demanded by industry and governments to spur economic growth. This article describes a methodology for teaching wireless communications standards. We define our methodology around six learning stages that assimilate the standardization process and identify key learning objectives for each. Enabled by software-defined radio technology, we describe a practical learning environment that facilitates developing many of the needed technical and soft skills without the inherent difficulty and cost associated with radio frequency components and regulation. Using only open source software and commercial of-the-shelf computers, this environment is portable and can easily be recreated at other educational institutions and adapted to their educational needs and constraints. We discuss our and our students' experiences when employing the proposed methodology to 4G LTE standard education at Barcelona Tech.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The evolution of markets under entry and standards regulation - the case of global mobile telecommunication.

We analyze the effects of government policies on the evolution of an industry, the global mobile telecommunications market. We find a relatively slow diffusion convergence between countries. This follows partly from regulatory delay in issuing first licenses, yet persisting initial cross-country differences also contribute to a lack of convergence. Introducing competition has a strong immediate impact on diffusion, but a weak impact afterwards; sequential entry is preceded by pre-emptive behavior by incumbents. This is consistent with the presence of consumer switching costs. Setting a single technological standard accelerates the diffusion of analogue technologies considerably; for digital technologies it is too early to draw reliable conclusions, yet the available evidence suggests that setting single standards has similar beneficial effects.Competition; Costs; Effects; Industry; Convergence;

Long-Range Communications in Unlicensed Bands: the Rising Stars in the IoT and Smart City Scenarios

Connectivity is probably the most basic building block of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. Up to know, the two main approaches to provide data access to the \emph{things} have been based either on multi-hop mesh networks using short-range communication technologies in the unlicensed spectrum, or on long-range, legacy cellular technologies, mainly 2G/GSM, operating in the corresponding licensed frequency bands. Recently, these reference models have been challenged by a new type of wireless connectivity, characterized by low-rate, long-range transmission technologies in the unlicensed sub-GHz frequency bands, used to realize access networks with star topology which are referred to a \emph{Low-Power Wide Area Networks} (LPWANs). In this paper, we introduce this new approach to provide connectivity in the IoT scenario, discussing its advantages over the established paradigms in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, and architectural design, in particular for the typical Smart Cities applications

Wearable Communications in 5G: Challenges and Enabling Technologies

As wearable devices become more ingrained in our daily lives, traditional communication networks primarily designed for human being-oriented applications are facing tremendous challenges. The upcoming 5G wireless system aims to support unprecedented high capacity, low latency, and massive connectivity. In this article, we evaluate key challenges in wearable communications. A cloud/edge communication architecture that integrates the cloud radio access network, software defined network, device to device communications, and cloud/edge technologies is presented. Computation offloading enabled by this multi-layer communications architecture can offload computation-excessive and latency-stringent applications to nearby devices through device to device communications or to nearby edge nodes through cellular or other wireless technologies. Critical issues faced by wearable communications such as short battery life, limited computing capability, and stringent latency can be greatly alleviated by this cloud/edge architecture. Together with the presented architecture, current transmission and networking technologies, including non-orthogonal multiple access, mobile edge computing, and energy harvesting, can greatly enhance the performance of wearable communication in terms of spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, latency, and connectivity.Comment: This work has been accepted by IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazin

The Nature, Timing and Impact of Broadband Policies: a Panel Analysis of 30 OECD Countries

We empirically investigate the impact of a vast array of public policies on wireline broadband penetration through a novel and unique dataset covering 30 OECD countries, over 1995-2010. We find that while both supply and demand-side policies have a positive effect on broadband penetration, their relative impact depends on the actual stage of broadband diffusion. When an advanced stage is reached, only demand-side policies appear to generate a positive and increasing effect. Moreover, both technological and market competition play a positive role, and the effect of the latter shows a non-linear path along the stage of market development. Finally, the relative weight of the service sector in the national economy reveals to be crucial for broadband penetration. Our analysis provides new insights into the policy debate and in particular on the rationale of a selective policy design for broadband penetration and, in perspective, for the rollout of next-generation networks.telecommunications policies, broadband penetration, infrastructure investments